Why We Can’t Get Our Story of Covid Straight

In popular culture, a successful plot is a recognizable plot — the hero’s epic journey, the marriage’s inevitable consummation, the dashing warrior who slays the monster. Some narratologists argue that there are no more than a handful of basic plots — story lines that are recycled again and again, such as “the quest,” “rebirth” and “rags to riches.” Hollywood producers tend to agree, as illustrated by an old industry jokemy father, a screenwriter, once told meabout the head of production who demands a movie plot that is exactly the same as the last one — except different.

As the coronavirus pandemic appears to be coming to an end — “the end” itself being a literary term of art — we may think we know its complete story. Covid has saturated the news and inundated media streams of all genus and species. But information is not a story. Nor are Facebook posts, TikTok videos, nor death and hospitalization statistics.

Stories are fundamental to the human experience, the historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued, and the key to why Homo sapiens came to rule the world: “Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively,” Mr. Harari wrote in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” How will we think of this episode in human history? What will we glean from it? In order to come to terms with what has happened — the losses, the fears, the conspiratorial craziness, the isolation, the political conflict and all the rest — Covid will need its own story. What will the Covid plot be?

One problem is that we have neither a shared language nor a shared understanding of what we’ve just been through. The story is diffuse, the heroism scattered among thousands of doctors and nurses and medical workers, the pain and sacrifice dispersed among neighbors and victims and volunteers. The bad guys are neither monsters nor demons but the vagaries of biology and the long-held habits of tribalism that have left us angry or indifferent. For most of us there were no grand metaphorical or metaphysical lessons learned. Has narrative at long last deserted us?

Many of the attempts made so far to capture the pandemic in story lines — Gary Shteyngart’s “Our Country Friends: A Novel,” Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show,” Judd Apatow’s “The Bubble,” for example— are at their heart domestic or workplace comedies, slice-of-life near-farces that gloss over the omnipresent dread and anger that have gripped the world over the past two years.

There’s clearly a market for such representations: Four million viewers tuned into the “South Park” episode “The Pandemic Special,” giving the animated comedy its highest rating in over seven years. But these comedic works have generally presented the pandemic as a backdrop, and failed to directly reckon with the thing itself. They are Covid-adjacent, not the Covid plot.

A variation on the Covid plot has been the plague narrative — the one familiar from the Old Testament, told every Passover, in which sickness and death appear as apocalyptic punishments, sparing only those who are pure of heart. The Michael Bay-produced insta-movie “Songbird,” about a fictitious Covid-23 in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, offers a modern version of the plague narrative, dredging up every cliché of zombified sci-fi, including the Big Bad (Peter Stormare) and the obligatory damsel in distress (Disney Channel star Sofia Carson).

The plague version of the Covid plot may also help to explain why some evangelicals were suspicious of human interventions to prevent the virus’s spread, such as vaccines and social distancing. But as death rates decrease and masks come off — and both apocalypse and rapture have, once again, been postponed — the vengeance-of-God narrative may be harder to sustain.

Ever since the virus appeared in Wuhan, China, its story has had an element of gothic fantasy, roiling with subversive secrets, mad scientists and evil doers. This version of the Covid plot has become the property of the conspiracy theorists, those who see the virus as a result of conscious malfeasance, pandemic as “Plandemic.” This narrative is feverish and simplistic, with comic-book-style villains wielding microchips and master plans. It may satiate primal desires, but it relies upon too many obvious untruths, and doesn’t jibe with the day-to-day dullness of this pandemic that has driven so many of us to the edge.

It’s possible that we’re so eager to forget the trauma of the past two years that the cultural works of our time will redact it from our collective memory. Indeed, several television shows produced during the pandemic have simply ignored it — HBO Max’s “And Just Like That” and NBC’s “Mr. Mayor,” for example — in which the pandemic, though briefly acknowledged, seems to have passed without leaving a mark (or a mask) on the characters.

There’s some historical precedent for this: Another infamous global contagion didn’t leave a large footprint on the cultural landscape. In 1918, the world was stunned by the devastation of the Spanish flu, but that monumental killer of more than 50 million people was comparatively absent from the novels, films, plays and songs of the era, a phenomenon that the writer Laura Spinney argues marks “our collective forgetting of the greatest massacre of the twentieth century.” Wars, by contrast, always loom large in our cultural imagination, and the First World War, which despite its ghastly toll took far fewer lives than the Spanish flu, inspired literary classics such as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “The Sun Also Rises”; the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; the music of Benjamin Britten and Gustav Holst.

“The Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively,” notes Ms. Spinney in her book “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World.” “Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.” Perhapsthose who lived through that pandemic simply did not possess the narrative tools to tell its story in aggregate. Such an event, according to Ms. Spinney, “requires a different storytelling approach.”

It’s a truism that some experiences are simply too painful to remember. And as the neurologist Scott A. Small wrote recently, the mind’s tendency to forget awful experience rather than dwelling upon it is an essential defense mechanism: It “protects us from this debilitating anxiety not by deleting memories but by quieting their emotional scream.”

But forgetting at a societal level can be dangerous. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Perhaps we have to accept the fact that Covid has no plot as the narratologists have defined such a thing, that we’ll never read The Great American Covid Novel. And maybe that’s a good thing. At this point we don’t need another rehash of our well-worn mythologies. Maybe instead, this moment will force us into a new paradigm for making sense of the world.

Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein transformed the ways people understood the narrative structures of their lives — telling us that we were no longer at the center of the universe, that we were the outcome of incremental change and not divine spark, that our ideas of time and space were subjective. Could we be on the verge of such a moment of difficult enlightenment — not a new plot, perhaps, but a new understanding?

If so, let it be one that eschews the hero’s journey, replacing it with a mosaic of collective valor, a human community assembled to withstand the ferocity of nature when it assumes its next epically violent form. That may be our best shot at a happy ending.

Frederick Kaufman is a journalist and narratologist whose most recent book, “The Money Plot,” dissects the story of money.

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